Rise in Voice Search Ignored by Retailers

Friday, April 26, 2019 - 11:45 by Graham Miller

A study conducted by Bing Ads has revealed that the majority of brands, retailers and advertising agencies are not taking full advantage of the fact that more and more people are searching the internet and carrying out safe shopping online via smart voice assistants.

On average a consumer will carry out a voice search from their mobile device or smart speaker system twice in a typical 24-hour period, according to Internet Retailing. However, the amount of effort which is being put into leveraging this fact by advertisers is minimal, with just two per cent of marketing spend being channelled into optimising for this form of search.

Voice search is more popular amongst younger consumers, with Gen Z shoppers almost twice as likely to look up information and peruse products with a spoken command rather than a typed query.

The one retailer that was singled out for being ahead of the curve and on top of this trend was Argos, which is seemingly the only store that seems to appreciate the increasingly important role that voice search is playing in driving shoppers to e-commerce sites and determining the kinds of products they are likely to purchase.

Report spokesperson Jason Miller said that as smart assistant services become more widely used, more and more people will transition to voice search, especially in a domestic context where devices like Amazon’s Echo speaker range and Alexa software are increasingly common.

Just under a fifth of marketers believe that there will be an uptick in the amount of money that is spent on targeting consumers via voice search in the next 12 months, so it seems that this segment will continue to expand comparatively slowly, even if there is a lot of enthusiasm for it amongst many shoppers.